"If you care a lot about the future, it shows that you believe in what you're doing now and you think it's worthwhile enough to have some lasting impact." – Syd Mead

Menu

EPA

“We will restore science to its rightful place”
— President Barack Obama at his inaugural address

I heard this past weekend that the EPA has classified carbon dioxide as a pollutant that is hazardous to public health, and therefor needs to be regulated. What I feel is being left out of the discussion is that this much maligned gas is plant food. I assume we all learned about the process of photosynthesis in high school biology. In our society we apparently talk a lot about being “green”, but it appears to me that the EPA’s decision is actually anti-green.

There are a couple interesting things to note. One is that CO2 is heavier than air, so it has a tendency to sink towards the Earth. The Greenhouse Effect takes place in the upper atmosphere. I imagine there’s a bit of CO2 up there. The amount of it in the atmosphere as a whole is minute, about 380 parts per million. Here’s a decent article on the chemical composition of the atmosphere, and what’s known about its evolution since the Earth was first formed. It’s a bit old (it said CO2 was (currently) at 360 PPM).

Secondly, the chemical equation for photosynthesis (see the 2nd link called “process of photosynthesis”) shows that an equal amount of oxygen is produced from the amount of carbon dioxide that was introduced into the process. So more CO2 at the start will eventually produce a more oxygen-rich environment.

I understand there are concerns about global warming stemming from rising CO2 levels, but this side of the science is left out of the discussion, and it shouldn’t be. CO2 has a good side as well, and what these videos show in the small is that our biosphere has a natural response to higher carbon dioxide levels. It is absorbed into the bodies of plants and more oxygen is produced. We can think of plants as our natural carbon scrubbers. More than that, more plant growth leads to more food for us and animal life.